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'Dead Pet Acting': Legacies of Stanislavsky View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The University of Sydney: Sydney eScholarship Journals... More than ‘Dead Pet Acting’: Legacies of Stanislavsky IAN MAXWELL It is easy to misunderstand Konstantin Stanislavsky.1 He is reviled by the left, champions of Brecht, for his bourgeois humanism; ignored by the post- structuralists, champions of Artaud, for his arch-modernism; claimed by the psychoanalysts of the Actors Studio as the inventor of the Method. His achievements are rendered as a unified, completed corpus—a theory— characterized in uncomplicated opposition to the equally unproblematized “theory” of his compatriot, collaborator and friend, Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold’s topography of the actor, goes the story, followed the logic of the (William) Jamesian schema (famously: “I saw the bear, I ran, I felt afraid”) to produce an “outside-in”, “physical” theory of acting. Stanislavsky, in contrast, worked from the inside out, producing a “psychological” theory of acting; the theory that, notwithstanding the political/formalist diversions of Brecht, won out in the grand narrative of theatre history.2 In fact, Stanislavsky only reluctantly committed his work to the page. His first book, the autobiographical My Life in Art, was published in 1924 in response to the success of his company’s American tours of 1923 and 1924; the second, An Actor Prepares, was written as the first of what Stanislavsky expected to be a seven book magnum opus, and published posthumously in 1936. The other English-language publications bearing his name—Building a Character and Creating a Role 3—are better read as collections of drafts and notes, rather than the explication of a single model. For Stanislavsky was first and foremost a practitioner; a man of the stage. Meyerhold wrote of his regard for “the great master”, “standing head and shoulder above the hurly-burly . gallic by nature . wielding his rapier like a master, with a tirelessly supple body . born for the theatre of extravagant grotesque and enthralling tragedy . [a] lover of cloak-and- sword drama.”4 Indeed Stanislavsky’s work is best understood less as a dis- 93 Stanislavsky crete, coherent, positive achievement—a theory—than what, two millennia before, the “enlightened Lesbonax of Myteline” called “manual philosophy”.5 That is, an embodied, unfolding, practical philosophy: a sustained interrogation of human being, undertaken in the chaos and fluidity of the workshop, rehearsal room and studio. Viewed thus, Stanislavsky appears less as one pole of an irreducible opposition than as a practitioner mediating, at a quotidian, embodied level, a cluster of countervailing ideas, aspirations, logics, knowledges and political imperatives. As the opening lines of My Life in Art suggest: “I was born in Moscow in 1863, a time that may well be taken as the border-line between epochs ... from serfdom to Bolshevism and Communism, I lived an interesting life in an age of changing values and fundamental ideas” (p. 13). Stanislavsky mediated the call, on one side, of an ascendant, post- Enlightenment scientific positivism, and on the other, of an insistent mystic- ism and spirituality, which pervades Stanislavsky’s own breathing and relaxation practices, and informs his attempts to understand the effect theatre has on its audience. Stanislavsky was torn, too, between his own bourgeois sensibility—strikingly apparent upon a reading of his auto- biography—and the dictates of post-Revolutionary sovietization. In turn, this played out both in Stanislavsky’s negotiation of his status as a figure- head of (Soviet) theatrical respectability, toeing the party genre line, and in his grounding as a “lover of cloak-and-sword drama”, and his fascination with the kinds of experimentation with technique and form with which Meyerhold was working—and which led to Meyerhold’s death. An added complication was the various censorships to which his work was sub- jected, implicitly and explicitly, by the Soviet state and its various organs on the one side, and the imperatives of the free market on the other. Market and state conspired to ensure the somewhat contradictory reification of his work as “The System”, and its mystification and appropriation in contexts outside the Soviet Union. Standing, then, on the fault-lines of the first half of the twentieth century, Stanislavsky attempted to reconcile these influences in an economy of practice, to a profoundly humanist end: “[o]ur art is not only to create the 94 Stanislavsky life of a human spirit, but also to express it in a beautiful, artistic form.”6 A Brief Biography7 Born into a bourgeois Francophile Russian family, Stanislavsky acted as a child in a family company, the Alexeyev Circle. “Fired by our stage activity,” Stanislavsky wrote, “Father built us a fine theatre in our Moscow home” (MLA, p. 76). Later, he formed a theatre company rather grandly named the Moscow Society of Art and Literature. As an actor, he quickly came to recognise both his own limitation—“I was tall, ungraceful and had a faulty diction” (MLA, p. 94)—and the limitations of the craft itself.8 He had a poor memory, learnt through imitation (in the classic master-apprentice model), was able only to reproduce performance mechanically (no more was expected), and suffered from stage fright. He despaired at the lack of systematicity in the craft, the randomness of approach. His physical attributes and his willingness to play romantic lead roles managed to get him through.9 In 1890 the Meiningen Players performed in Moscow, showcasing spec- tacular work staged by director Ludwig Kronegk. Kronegk’s orchestration of crowd scenes, his mastery of lighting and his other naturalistic stage effects revolutionized the way in which theatre was made—he is often credited with “inventing” the stage director as the pre-eminent creative agent in theatrical work.10 In the 1890s, Stanislavsky threw himself into this first-wave auteurism, mounting productions on the basis of extraordinarily detailed plans, developing a dictator-like control over every element of each work.11 In 1897, Stanislavsky met with playwright, director and acting teacher Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko—a meeting celebrated as perhaps the most significant in modern theatre history.12 For eighteen hours, the two put the theatrical world to rights, formulating the blueprint for the Moscow Art Theatre, dedicated to the highest ideals of ensemble art, good citizenry and public education. The bases of the Company’s approach were to be simplicity, clarity, an end to traditional modes of employment for actors, the alternation of large and small roles, and detailed realization of the essence and world of each play (MLA, pp. 216-22). 95 Sydney Studies This was the great flourishing of naturalism—the determination to reproduce the world on stage. Research was fetishized; the mundane real was recreated. Things came to an immediate head with the famous 1898 production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, which was a disaster. Chekhov was incensed at Stanislavsky’s pedantry, reminding him that “the theatre is art”.13 Although Stanislavsky was revolutionizing theatrical form, he still had no way of leading actors towards a realization of the complex inner life that Chekhov had written for them. Around the time of Chekhov’s death in 1904, Stanislavsky recalls summing up his experiences: I had accumulated a bagful of artistic experience and acting and directing tricks. But all this was in utter disorder, not systematized, making it impossible for me to use the artistic wealth I had amassed. It was necessary to put everything in order, sort out, classify and assess this material. (MLA, p. 346) The “System” From this point, Stanislavsky’s focus shifted. What became known as “The System” was indeed Stanislavsky’s attempt to put the craft of acting on a solid, rational, scientific basis. However, the system in itself was not the end of Stanislavsky’s work, but the means to a higher vocation. For Stanislavsky, the end of theatre was the revelation of truths of the human spirit. The realism to which he aspired was not that of the mundane world— his art was not to simply reflect the quotidian, but to illuminate it through an access to a higher, spiritual order of being. The cardinal principle guiding this aspiration was “inspiration”. The actor reproducing a rhetorical language of the stage, or the outward signs of a truth they perhaps once experienced, but now only signify, cannot hope to reveal human truths. Instead, the actor must access the truth in every moment of their performance. Inspiration is the realm of what is routinely translated in Stanislavsky as “the subconscious”. Yet the actor’s obligation is not to yield to the capriciousness of the inspired subconscious, but consciously to bring the subconscious to heel. This then, is the central, paradoxical idea in Stanislavsky: to structure that which by definition is unstructured. To be 96 Stanislavsky inspired on cue, nightly, continuously: “in our art you must live the part every moment that you are playing it, and every night.” (AAP, p. 19) The system is explicated most completely in An Actor Prepares. Jean Benedetti has spent a great deal of time reconstructing the totality of the system from Stanislavsky’s notes, the accounts of his students, and the fragmentary writings, some of which have been published as the companion volumes to An Actor Prepares. Benedetti’s work is impressive, presenting a useful, if perhaps overly schematic diagram.14 Merlin’s more recent approach has been to offer a chapter-by-chapter précis of the entire book.15 Rather than attempt to schematize, and in so doing, feint towards a closure Stanislavsky never himself managed, I will point only to a number of key features of the system as adduced in An Actor Prepares.
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